BioShock Infinite Can Run More Than 23% Faster With New RadeonSI Patches

Marek Olšák at AMD continues optimizing the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for offering much better Linux gaming performance when using this open-source AMD graphics driver code. The latest are double-digit gains for at least the BioShock Infinite game.

The longtime Mesa developer sent out a set of eight patches for using unflushed fences for deferred flushes. For at least BioShock Infinite, this spells huge performance wins.

Olšák noted, "This series makes Bioshock Infinite 23% faster. Along with the CPU overhead optimizations that are in the master branch already, the combined improvement is more than 40%."

But it gets even better... That 23% is basically the baseline when using these RadeonSI patches with the AMDGPU kernel driver. If using the Radeon DRM driver for older GPUs, the performance gains are expected to be even higher. Marek clarified, "BTW, 23% is for amdgpu. It's more than 23% on radeon because of how inefficiently it implements fences."

Hopefully these patches will land soon and yes I plan then for a new round of AMD Linux graphics card benchmarks.